I couldn’t sleep, which isn’t that unusual for me. And my mind was racing with all kinds of creative ideas…also, not that unusual for me. But then the oddest idea came to me at about 2am — I was thinking about the 1973 movie Blackenstein, one of the worst movies ever made, and how I would have done things completely different if I’d made that movie. And in an instant, an image popped in my head of what my version of the monster would look like. I reached for a pen and drew a quick sketch (pictured above). A few minutes after that, the story came to me. Seriously. It popped in my head, I wrote down the basic plot, and vowed to turn my insomnia fueled idea into a comic. That was four years ago. Now there is a comic, it is done, and The Monster of Blackenstyne (not to be confused with Blackenstein) is a reality. Explaining this project to potential collaborators was not easy. Most people didn’t get where I was coming from. Likewise, publishers didn’t understand what I was doing, which was creating a dark satire fused with blaxploitation, written in style reminiscent of comics published in the 1970s, while trying to use the medium of comics to say something relevant, but obscuring that relevance under gratuitous violence, overwrought dialog, and pure silliness. I’m proud to say I succeeded. And as someone who is his own harshest critic, this is a project I’m proud of, due in no small part to the artists who brought it to life, Marcelo Di Chiara and Pedro Estouco. He is an unedited/uncorrected glimpse at the first page of the comic…
If you want to see more, please head over to Kickstarter and pledge your support for The Monster of Blackenstyne (not to be confused with Blackenstein). Here’s the link…https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dfwalker/the-monster-of-blackenstyne